Producing biomass energy requires extensive land resources. In western Massachusetts, where almost 90 percent of former farmland is no longer in commercial use, we study factors that motivate landowners to grow biomass energy crops. A geographic information system model identifies a landowner...

The Agricultural Act of 2014 brings significant changes to U.S. farm policy, eliminating Countercyclical (CC), Fixed Direct, and Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) programs, and introducing new Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) programs, which provide payments...

The decrease in the area of arable land has further continued in the European Union (EU) since the Millennium. Sustainable development is partially based on the sustainable use of natural resources, which is based on the limitation of land use and on the introduction of different incentives....

Though Zambia has considerable agricultural potential, the sector’s contribution to growth and poverty reduction has been limited. The sector remains one of the most important employers of labour and remains the main source of livelihood for most rural households in Zambia. Thus key...

This article analyses the impact of a water allocation priority policy for a specific crop on farmers’ acreage allocation to different crops. To accomplish this, a system of crop acreage demands conditional on output yields, prices of variable inputs and levels of quasi-fixed inputs is...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

China’s rural reforms expose farm households to the risk of administrative land reallocation and adjustment. The possibility of land reallocation gives rise to the problem of tenure insecurity which reduces farm households' incentives to invest in the land and to use the labor forces...

The National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management now requires that water quality objectives and limits be set for all water bodies in New Zealand. Where objectives result in the development of nitrate limits for waterways and development pressure is likely to make these limits difficult to...